iPhone Can Listen and Identify Songs

[Update] Listen was quickly shut down by Sony. Since iPhone OS 2.0 came out, and the App Store has been launched, the best (in my experience) song identification app is now Shazam. [/Update]

Erica (you may see her posts over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is at it again… she has hacked together Listen, a native app that records a snippet of audio from the iPhone’s built-in speaker, and then goes online to identify the song. It’s in early development, but so far it has given me perfect results, and I’m subjecting it to more than Top 40. I’d LOVE to see Sam Steele integrate this into his MobileScrobbler app, so that you could grab a sample of a song around you and be at the song’s Last.fm page in seconds. Here’s a quick video I did to show the application in action.

There are quite a few other phones that have been able to do this for a while, I’m sure you’ve seen the Verizon commercials. However, I’m completely impressed by the community of developers hacking away at the iPhone and iPod Touch. They have been the only reason that the extremely bland (when stock) iPhone has become such an interesting device. I hope the official Apple Mobile OSX SDK gives developers easy access to the hardware. I know they’ve stated that it will be limited, but I’m hoping the limits aren’t too tight to allow this type of development.

[Update]: A couple Digg users have taken a look inside the application and found that it’s piggy-backing on Sony’s sound identification service for its own cell phones. It will be interesting to see how long the app can stay alive.